Michael Paul Goldenberg, WCYDWT spokesmodel:

When they want to see more methods, they’ll let you know. When they become discontented with their ideas of proof, they’ll let you know. And it WILL happen. Because there will always be kids who ask themselves and their peers: “Why does that work? Why does that make sense? How do you know?” And that’s all we need to nurture in them: their own natural curiosity, rather than suppress that and replace it with curiosity about only the following: What does the teacher think? What does the teacher want me to say or do? What do I need to do to get an A?

I like this.

Todd Seal earns the melodramatic title of his post, How Will We Survive?:

My library has already been cut. We will have no bookroom clerk, making novels almost an impossibility and replacement costs much higher than previous years for sure. We will lose one adviser, the person we send students to when they are problematic. We will have a total of fifteen more students each day, meaning that we’ll teach five and a half classes for the same pay as we usually get for teaching just five. The reproduction clerk is gone, meaning that we all will have three-hundred copies per month, end of discussion, and we’ll have to allot time to make those copies ourselves instead of dropping them off and picking them up later. The whisper has it that our athletics director will go away. There’s even talk of moving to two administrators, dropping from our current three. All these things mean that folks will be placed back into classrooms, where the newly christened teachers will be the first on the chopping block. This news comes before what are rumored to be even larger final budget cuts. I can only imagine what further decimation will happen after that.

While maybe not reflective (on its own) of any massive change in my pedagogy since I started teaching, the growing size of each year’s lesson folder does reflect my growing tendency toward visual mathematical multimedia.

Sort of.

I can’t really leave teaching on better terms than these.

I never coached tennis. I never sponsored a club. I didn’t attend the plays or games or concerts I always felt I should have. I regret that. I never watched a freshman class graduate, never saw them from the start of high school to the finish. I regret that most of all.

But I have made amends with classroom management, time management, and compensation, the challenges which, at various points over five years, had me talking to admissions officers at schools of engineering and medicine. After five years, I am unequivocally a “happy” teacher.

I regard this professional transformation (from miserable to happy, incompetent to competent) with complete stupefication. The arc of a new teacher’s development is short and bends in any number of directions. My own was filled from beginning to end with lucky coincidences, chance mentors who appeared and disappeared at the exact moment I most needed them, hobbies from my childhood which came back around to pay off huge dividends in my classroom. I can’t explain any of it. I know I could do it all over again and arrive a completely different teacher.

I need to get a fix on some larger issues of teacher development and I can’t do that from the ground level here, from the classroom, with blog posts scattered around and squeaked out in the fifteen-minute interval after lesson planning ends and before my wife gets off shift. I am enrolled in in the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for the fall, to what end I don’t yet know. But I’m ready to spend half a decade or more pursuing the answer to a single, confounding question.